Net stacked distribution graphs are a nice way of comparing data on a Likert scale. It strips out the neutral responses and centers the responses around the center of the graph so you can quickly compare agreement and disagreement on different issues. Here we'll build on Jason Becker's work on doing this in ggplot2 -- it requires a dosage of deviousness.

A Poisson process provides a good model for events that happen rarely. That's what von Bortkiewicz realized in 1898 when he modeled deaths by horse kick in Prussian cavalry; since it would be ungentlemanly to actually kill my readers, I instead represent the events in a Poisson process using a horse's whinny.

The recent Sonification Handbook has a chapter devoted to exploratory data analysis using sound. With some help from Sam Ferguson, one of the chapter's authors, I've made it easy to implement those techniques using R with playitbyr.

The good news is that I got into University of Minnesota's awesome Statistical Education Masters program, where I'll be learning to teach statistics and research innovative new techniques for teaching. The sad news is that I've lost an old friend: my undergraduate career, who reached his teenage years in 2011. It started with classes I […]

Here's the numbers of yearly sunspots, 1700-1988, brought to you by the nimble marimba of R: See ?sunspot.year in R for more information about the data. I did this last spring and just discovered it again. I've been so caught up in the current sound world of playitbyr (see this post for an example) that […]

Apparent Reason, my new monthly podcast, is a boisterous and non-technical discussion of economics and statistics. In that format I don't have the luxury of showing charts and graphs to complement my discussion, so I use the playitbyr package to represent the data as sound. (Apparently February is a great month to start R-related podcasts! […]

(Update: The csound package is now available on CRAN.) Do your random variables need to groove more? Of course they do. That's why I've been working on the upcoming csound package for R, which connects to Csound computer synthesis software to make any sound imaginable. Your computer'll be the hippest sample space on the randomized […]

The Occupy Wall Street movement chants "We are the 99 percent, you are the 1 percent." It's a catchy refrain, and there are many excellent reasons to put the focus on Wall Street in the struggle for economic and political justice in the US. But even singling out one percent of the US means we […]

Sparks have been flying between my favorite data analysis language and my favorite programmer's Q & A site since long ago: R flirted with StackOverflow on September 10, 2008, 5 days before StackOverflow was even open to the public. R still hesitates to leave its original suitor, the loud and lively R-help mailing list, where […]